What Muslims Must Do After 77 - Road to the Middle Class

A WEEK AFTER the bombings of 7/7 the British think they have a problem. The bombers were native Britons. They weren’t crazed loners or foreigners but Islamic children of the British nation state, kids who had enjoyed the full benefit of a modern, social democratic childhood as directed down to the last detail by modernizing New Labour functionaries.

Cheer up Brits. You don’t have a problem. It’s the Muslims that have the problem. The mad Islamicist bombers will confine Muslims everywhere to the margins of the modern world unless they do something about them.

But the solution to the problem is not, as many seem to think, that the Muslim community “must” deliver up its dangerous extremists to justice. Even sober American minds, like Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg, have fallen for this approach.

This idea, waving a big stick after years of apology and talk of diversity and inclusion, is hardly likely to succeed.

Instead, we should trade on the need of every immigrant community to rise up in the world and join the in-crowd. We should take the high-handed approach that every desirable club or in-group takes. We should send the same message that the Marines send with their timeless advertisement: “We are looking for a few good men.”

All desirable groups—monasteries, armies, clubs, lawyers, physicians, and even gangs—indoctrinate their applicants with the idea that they must go through a challenging but necessary novitiate to prove their worthiness before they can acquire full membership. To be a full member in the club means something, and it would be wrong to lower the standards just to be nice.

This principle applies in spades when we talk about earning citizenship in the world’s democratic nation states.

But our lefty friends send quite a different message to the many groups, like the Muslims, not yet fully integrated into the western club. Instead of praising the west they apologize—for its racism, its sexism, its classism, and they have rewarded “minority” communities for taking on the role of helpless victim. Why should any minority community want to join a club that is apologizing for its faults?

Fresh from our morning study of Heidegger and Rorty, we conservative postmodernists understand what is going on here. It is power. First of all, our lefty friends have painstakingly constructed a narrative that justifies their power: how they nobly freed the slaves, how they fought for worker rights, for women’s suffrage, for civil rights, for a woman’s right to choose, and for diversity, and how they deserve to occupy well-paid sinecures with lifetime tenure to defend and extend these social gains. One of the interlocking directorates of their vast monopoly is the racial grievance industry, charged with the project of enlarging the natural sense of insecurity in minority communities into a sense of outraged and electorally useful grievance. What a concept!

Of course, our lefty friends do not play this game with their own treasured institutions. In the selection of tenured college professors they operate a system of ruthless exploitation and humiliation designed to select only the best for membership. The system puts tens of thousands of would-be college professors through years of sweatshop wages and tenure-track hell. But it is all worth it, to hope to become one day a member of the academic elite. Even lefties believe that membership has its privileges.

But the 7/7 bombing is not the first attack this year upon the members of the nation state club. Before British Muslims sent the message that they didn’t want to belong to a club that apologized for its members, the French and the Dutch in two elections beat back an attack by the EU elite on their nation states.

These events warn us that the elite project to emasculate the nation state and replace it with supranational institutions is well advanced. The project wants to destroy the nation state by encouraging separatism in minority communities and by subsuming the nation state in supranational organizations accountable only to elites.

The nation state is worth fighting for. It is the miraculous idea that persuades ordinary people to abandon as a primary political loyalty their local blood ties of family and clan and enter into a larger social compact of national identity. It is the difference between Arabia and the developed world. It requires the abandonment of the code of honor, the blood feud, the culture of nepotism. It demands taking up the world of contract, and the rule of law, and extending the circle of trust beyond the boundary of blood and faith.

Let us welcome with open arms the Muslim communities in full partnership in our nation states. But first they need to complete the customary apprenticeship in western ways and western culture. It will be worth it.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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What Muslims Must Do After 7/7

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